Krut: The Mythic Wings Review

Krut: The Mythic Wings is a hack-and-slash, side-scrolling platformer developed by RSU Horizon, Good Job Multimedia and Pixel Perfex, and is published by Australian-based Blowfish Studios. I’ve played a number of amazing titles from Blowfish over the past few years, including the recent Catie in MeowmeowLand, and I am happy to add Krut: The Mythic Wings to that list with some caveats. The game is not without its faults but is a decent platformer with great character and environment detail, so long as you don’t mind reading the dialogue.

In a world full of mystical creatures and magic, the ruthless army of the Ogre invaded the land of the Garuda race. The Garuda army was defeated, and the capital city was eventually fallen. Upon the destruction and despair, a badly wounded warrior found himself on a mysterious enchanted island called Himmaphan. He met a mysterious figure who entrusted him with a powerful artifact, the Mythic Wings.

Krut: The Mythic Wings is a game based on a 2018 Thai CG animated feature-length film “Krut: The Himmaphan Warriors”, following the adventure of a Garuda warrior on the enchanted Island, Himmaphan. I haven’t heard of this before but what attracted me to the game was its platforming combat and level graphics.

The game’s introduction sequence introduces you to the backstory of the protagonist, however there’s no spoken dialogue, only text, and this intro sequence went on for five minutes which was a little long in the tooth but gave you enough to commence the story. You are tasked with traversing these lands looking for the six powers which will help defeat the final boss.

I played Krut: The Mythic Wings on PC with a controller and you press ‘X’ for a light attack, ‘Y’ for a heavy attack, ‘B’ is for dodge and ‘A’ to jump and double-jump. You can hold ‘Y’ for a charged attack and can do both light and heavy air attacks after you have jumped. You have two meters to worry about, health and power, and when both are at 100% you can press both left button and right button simultaneously to use Power of Wings which gives you powerful aerial attacks for the duration of your power consumption.

There is a bit of running and platforming with big gaps between monsters, but the monsters we do see are well animated. Most have tells when they’re about to attack, but it will be trial and error to learn these as well as their moves. At the top of the screen is a level progress bar that shows white dots for checkpoints which are halfway and near the end, and there’s an icon for the end boss of each level.

While killing monsters, you will earn health and power orbs, as well as green gems. The health orbs are very few and far between, so you basically need to try get to each checkpoint with as much health as possible. The midway checkpoint has a mini-boss to defeat, and the end bosses have various mechanics you need to learn and look out for.

The green gems are used when you get to a checkpoint. You are given a choice to spend 1000 gems to unlock the checkpoint stone. Early on I activated most of them and once activated, they give you access to invest gems into special upgrades. Upgrades range from gaining an extra life, increasing your health and power pools, regenerating your health and power, and unlocking combos.

Combos are lacklustre in all they do is add an additional light attack before the final heavy attack. For example, XXY, XXXY, XXXXY, and so on. They do extra damage of course at a cost of power, however sometimes the time it takes to do the animation of the final heavy attack means the enemy mob can hit you, which interrupts the whole combo and you take damage. Also, if you are partway through a combo and jump or dodge, it stops the combo.

If you run out of lives, you must restart that whole level again from the start which can be frustrating at times, but not uncommon in this genre. There’s no way to save your progress, so if you must go do adult things partway through a level, you’ll need to start that level over again. It means you can play the game in short bursts, and it feels good to finally finish each level.

After a while, all I came to rely on was light attacks while jumping at the mobs, and the occasional simple combos of XXY and XXXY on bosses or jumping/dodging through it then wailing on it’s back. They do turn around quick and will hit you hard, and later mobs will do chain attacks which you can’t dodge out of. Combat did get repetitive though.

Overall, I enjoyed my time in Krut: The Mythic Wings as a decent platformer with great character and environment detail, though combat got repetitive, and combos were underutilised. The lack of save points was annoying, but it felt rewarding finishing each level.

This review utilised a Steam key provided by Blowfish Studios and Krut: The Mythic Wings releases July 12, 2022 on Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch.

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